History of the Islamic World and the Modern Middle East

NMC 2080 H
THEORY AND METHOD IN MIDDLE EASTERN STUDIES
This reading-, speaking-, and writing-intensive course explores the history of the discipline and engages students in ongoing historiographical debates in Near and Middle Eastern Studies. In addition to the emergence of “Oriental Studies” in Europe and North America, students will interrogate the historical connections between the field and other academic disciplines. Particular attention will be paid to the conceptions of time, history, and society, which have played an important role in research and writing on the Middle East. Each student is required to apply the critical approaches and concepts learned in this course to a final historiographical research paper that is directly related to her/his major field of inquiry.

NMC 2081 H
ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE MIDDLE EAST
This course examines current theoretical and methodological trends in the anthropological study of the Middle East. The readings will offer students ethnographic insight into the region, introduce them to current research, and acquaint them with the kinds of questions that anthropologists ask (and the ones that they fail to ask). Possible topics include: (post-)colonialism, nationalism, gender, violence, history/memory, the politics of archeology, mass mediations, neoliberalism, and questions of ethnographic authority. A central goal of the course is to enable students to think in new, creative, and critical ways about their own research projects.

NMC 2090 Y (=NMC 273 Y)
ISLAMIC HISTORY TO THE FALL OF BAGHDAD
An introduction to the history of Islamic civilization in the core Islamic regions from the rise of Islam to the fall of the Abbasid Caliphate of Baghdad to the Mongols in 1258. Covering aspects of the religious, political, socio-economic, and cultural history of the formative period of Islamic civilization and focusing on some major themes and issues, this course provides a foundation and framework for further study in Islamic history and essential background for other fields. NMC 2090Y is the graduate section of NMC 273Y. Graduate students attend all of the lectures, and in addition to some shared assignments, are expected to read more widely and to write a major research paper.

NMC 2173 H (=NMC 473 H)
INTELLECTUALS OF THE MODERN ARAB WORLD
This course is designed to critically re-examine both the role of intellectuals in the modern Arab world and the political events that shaped their thinking. Through readings of selections of their works (in Arabic and/or in translation) the course introduces some leading thinkers of the Arab renaissance and Muslim revival of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Literary circles and social networks of intellectuals will be examined to shed light on the constitution and socialization of different groups of intellectuals in the late Ottoman and colonial periods. Topics will include secularism, Islamic revival, liberalism, nationalism, gender, cosmopolitanism, and anti-colonialism. Seminar discussions will focus on intellectuals as prisms through which political events and social structures of the modern Middle East are analyzed. Written assignments will be based on interpretations of Arabic texts (English translation optional): autobiographies, novels, essays, newspaper articles, speeches, poems, or lyrics.

NMC 2180H
IRANIAN MODERNITY
This seminar explores competing conceptions of Iranian modernity within a comparative historical framework on “multiple modernities.” While interrogating the modernity debate, it explores themes of the development and transformation of public and private spheres, imaginings of the national body and the body social, the themes of secularism and Islamism, rational and religious subjectivities, sexuality and gender, history and memory, revolution and national refashioning, universality and peculiarity, archotopia and heterotopia, and Self and the Other in Iran. A major theme is the exploration of the temporality and historicity in discussions of Iranian modernity. Each student in this course is expected to write a publishable research paper that addresses a significant aspect of Iranian modernity.

NMC 2225 Y (=NMC 348 Y)
HISTORY OF IRAN
Survey of the political and cultural history of greater Iran from the period of the Sasanian empire (3rd–7th centuries C.E.) to the end of the Safavid era (16th–18th centuries). The process of conversion of Zoroastrian Iran to Islam after the Arab invasions of the mid-7th century, and the role of local Iranian dynasties in the creation of the New Persian cultural renaissance. The domination of Iran and Central Asia by various Turkic and Turko-Mongolian dynasties from the 11th century onwards, including the Ghaznavids, Seljuqs, Ilkhanids, and Timurids, and their contributions to the creation of Perso-Islamicate culture. The emergence of the Safavid polity in the early 16th century, a watershed in the religio-political history of pre-modern Iran.

NMC 2310 Y (=NMC 377 Y)
OTTOMAN HISTORY TO 1800
A detailed survey of political, social, economic, and cultural aspects of the Rum Seljuk Sultanate and Ottoman Empire. In addition to attending lectures, students will prepare presentations on selected topics and write a research paper.

NMC 2345 Y (=NMC 274 Y)
THE STEPPE FRONTIER IN EURASIAN AND ISLAMIC HISTORY
This course will unfold along the eastern and northern frontiers of the Islamic world from Central Asia in the east to the Black and Caspian Sea steppes in the north and from these frontiers its focus will move into the lands of the Middle East. For centuries Turks, originally nomads in the Eurasian steppes, played varied and crucial roles in the lands of the Middle East—as slave-soldiers, raiders, migrants, conquerors, and state-builders. In connection with the latter, one need only to mention some of the many states founded by them: the Ghaznavid State, the Seljuk and Mamluk Sultanates, the Ottoman Empire, Safavid Iran. The remarkable career of the Turks and other nomads (notably the Mongols) in Islamdom will be traced; the process of their Islamization and their relationship with the cultures of the Middle East will be presented and analyzed. Topics to be covered include pastoral nomadism, steppe warfare, clan, tribal and state structures, ethnicity, sedentarization, and the roles of physical geography and ecology. The course will also provide a basis for understanding issues in present-day countries where Turks and Mongols played decisive historical roles—such as Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, India, Syria, Egypt, Turkey, and in the Caucasus.